I happened to be relaxing on my patio recently, staring at the sky. It was a crystal clear baby blue sky. I was transfixed by its allure. Then from seemingly nowhere a high-flying jet plane appeared flying in a southwesterly direction.

What caught my attention were two contrails jettisoning from the aft of the craft. Immediately, I thought of the chemtrail conspiracy I’d recently read about which has received an uptick in controversy of late.

The scientifical community dismisses it as folly, the concoction of overactive minds.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) counters claims of a governmental conspiracy with the following information from its scientific and regulatory experts with input by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA):

Contrails are line-shaped clouds sometimes produced by aircraft engine exhaust, typically at aircraft cruise altitudes several miles above the Earth’s surface. The combination of water vapor in aircraft engine exhaust and the low ambient temperatures that often exists at these high altitudes allows the formation of contrails. Contrails are composed primarily of water (in the form of ice crystals) and do not pose health risks to humans. They do affect the cloudiness of the Earth’s atmosphere, however, and therefore might affect atmospheric temperature and climate.

Sounds plausible, right? But what else would you expect the government to say?

The gears were still rolling in my head. “Is there anything to be made of the mystery clouding the skies?” Crisscrossing the wild blue yonder doesn’t make sense. Why would high-flying experimental jet aircraft zigzag across the expanse seemingly “tagging” the sky like aerial graffiti scrawlers?

I kept watching the plane’s emission and noticed after about five minutes that the contrail was slowly descending — not dissipating, as contrails are known to do rather quickly —but this particular stretch of condensation fell to about 1,000 feet, then dispersed into an expansive fog-like cloud, with a steady breeze pushing it northeast above South L.A.

I was more than a little baffled by the spectacle and the peculiar foggy essence.

“Was this a chemtrail? Why didn’t it break up and dissipate, and what was the particular composition that shrouded the shallow sky?”

It settled heavily on my mind. Was some scientific agency up to something they didn’t want the public to know about? Something sinister? Maybe they were experimenting with the weather? But it couldn’t have been cloud seeding because there weren’t any clouds.Like so, it couldn’t have been crop dusting, because there were no crops or farmland to speak of.

God forbid something pernicious is in effect.

Well, it’s got my juices roiling. I’m no chemtrail conspiracist — you can nip that! But the brief experience has me watching the skies and those tail emissions of high altitude jet aircraft.

Maybe more of us should take a gander at the crisscrossing patterns on the next big-blue-sky day and make a mental note of it.